Live Happy ADHD Coaching & Consulting

Live Happy ADHD Coaching & Consulting I am more than a coach; I am a partner and an advocate. YES, you can live a happy, healthy life with ADHD!

I partner with adults and parents of children with ADHD. Together, we develop techniques and strategies in order to build a better life and help you flourish. Using ADHD as our starting point, we forge a path together that works for you, so that you can live your best life. I continuously improve my education through industry-related certifications and stay current by reviewing the latest research

and studies on ADHD and its impact on physical and mental health. Through my own lived experience with ADHD, I am able to provide informed feedback and knowledge. I take the science and experience and translate them into strategies-ones that can improve your life and empower you.

The inner critic that runs in the background of most professional adults with ADHD isn't a personal failing. It's a lear...
09/07/2026

The inner critic that runs in the background of most professional adults with ADHD isn't a personal failing. It's a learned pattern — and understanding where it was learned is the beginning of changing it.

Research on ADHD development consistently finds that children with ADHD receive disproportionately more negative feedback from teachers, parents, and peers than their neurotypical counterparts — an estimated 20,000 additional negative messages by age 10. These messages don't stay in childhood. They shape the internal voice that most ADHD adults carry quietly into their professional lives.

For high-achieving professionals, the inner critic often sounds like: 'You're not as competent as people think.' 'You're one bad performance away from being found out.' 'Everyone else manages this — what's wrong with you?' This is a pattern so consistent in ADHD adults that it has a name in clinical contexts: impostor syndrome at elevated rates.

The professional cost of a loud, consistent inner critic is not just emotional. It's cognitive: processing resources that go toward self-monitoring, shame management, and threat detection are resources unavailable for strategic thinking, creative work, and authentic professional presence.

The reframe that ADHD coaching offers is precise: the inner critic is not a truth-teller. It's a pattern that was learned from a world that didn't have the tools to understand a neurodivergent child — and it was often being reported on symptoms, not character. The distinction matters because what was learned can, with the right support, be unlearned.

For professionals who've built successful careers while carrying this voice, the question isn't whether they can perform. It's what professional level becomes accessible when the overhead of the critic is reduced.

What messages is your inner critic running that were actually written by someone else? I'd welcome a conversation about what revision looks like.

High-performing professionals with ADHD tend to have an exhaustive understanding of their deficits and a significant bli...
08/26/2026

High-performing professionals with ADHD tend to have an exhaustive understanding of their deficits and a significant blind spot toward their genuine competitive advantages. Coaching changes that ratio.

Years of ADHD diagnosis and treatment that focuses on what's impaired produces a specific outcome: professionals who have a detailed map of what's hard and almost no map of what's genuinely powerful about how their brain operates.

The professional strengths associated with ADHD are documented, specific, and directly relevant to high-performance professional contexts:

Justice sensitivity — a deep, calibrated sense of fairness and an instinct to name and address inequity. In leadership, this produces advocacy, principled decision-making, and cultures where people feel seen.

Cognitive dynamism — the ability to engage multiple frameworks simultaneously, see problems from several angles, and shift fluidly between levels of abstraction. This is rare and highly valuable in strategic and complex problem-solving roles.

Contagious motivation — the quality of presence when genuinely engaged that activates teams, drives organizational energy, and creates the kind of visible leadership investment that people follow.

Creative problem-solving and divergent thinking — the 'scenic route' through a problem that consistently surfaces solutions and connections that more linear approaches miss.

Hyperfocus capacity — the ability to produce, in concentrated engaged periods, what would take others significantly longer.

The argument from coaching isn't that challenges don't exist alongside these strengths. It's that a professional operating from an incomplete picture of themselves is leaving real competitive advantage on the table — and building a career around managing deficits when they could be building one around genuine differentiation.

What ADHD-associated strength has produced the most professional value for you? I'd love to hear specific examples.

08/13/2026

For professionals with ADHD who've tried every cognitive approach to regulation and focus — planners, timers, apps, reframes — the lever that's most consistently underutilized is the body itself.

Dysregulation in ADHD — the scattered, flooded, or shutdown state that makes professional performance unreliable — is a nervous system event, not primarily a cognitive one. The instinct to solve it cognitively (make a better list, use a better system, try a different framework) often fails precisely because the cognitive layer is itself impaired by the dysregulation.

Body-based regulation approaches work through a different mechanism: they access the nervous system directly, through sensory and movement channels that bypass the overwhelmed cognitive layer.

For professionals, the most useful body-based tools include:

Proprioceptive input — physical movement and pressure (a brisk walk, bodyweight exercise, a weighted lap pad) that signals safety to the nervous system through sensory channels. Many professionals find that 10 minutes of physical movement between cognitive tasks meaningfully affects their subsequent focus quality.

Rhythmic movement — walking, rocking, tapping. The regulatory effect of rhythm on the nervous system is well-documented; the brain literally synchronizes to external rhythmic input.

Gaze anchoring — resting the eyes on a single, stable, non-stimulating point for 60-90 seconds. Slows visual processing and tends to reduce the experience of mental scatter.

High-intensity breathing protocols — several rounds of controlled breath work can shift sympathetic arousal measurably within minutes.

For knowledge workers managing demanding professional schedules: building body-based regulation practices into the structure of the workday — not as wellness extras but as performance maintenance tools — tends to produce meaningful improvements in sustained cognitive output.

Have you experimented with body-based regulation in your professional context? I'd love to hear what others have found useful.

08/11/2026

Impulsivity in professional contexts — the email sent before it should have been, the commitment made before thinking it through, the reaction that landed wrong — is rarely a character flaw. It's a trainable executive function gap, and the training has a name.

Urge surfing is a technique from dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) that's directly applicable to ADHD impulsivity management in professional settings. Its core insight is that impulses behave like waves: they rise, peak, and fall — typically within two minutes — when not acted upon or fought.

For professionals managing executive function challenges, the value of urge surfing lies in what it creates: a gap between the impulse and the action. In that gap, choice becomes available. Without the gap — when impulse and action are essentially simultaneous — professional behavior is driven by the reactive brain rather than the strategic one.

In professional practice, this applies to: the impulse to send a reactive email immediately rather than drafting and reviewing; the impulse to speak before fully formulating a position in a high-stakes meeting; the impulse to accept a commitment without checking current capacity; the impulse to abandon a difficult task in favor of a more stimulating one.

Urge surfing doesn't eliminate ADHD impulsivity. It builds metacognitive capacity — the ability to observe an impulse as an impulse rather than experiencing it as an automatic command. Over time, this noticing is what makes professional behavior more deliberate and less reactive.

For professionals in leadership roles where reactive professional behavior has created relationship or reputational consequences, this practice is often among the most immediately valuable coaching tools.

What impulse has caused the most professional friction for you? I'd love to talk about what urge surfing looks like in that specific context.

08/09/2026

When you're a skilled coach the right clients would love, and not enough of them can actually find you.

You'll walk out able to:
· Name three low-cost visibility strategies built for a solo ADHD practice
· Draft a niche positioning statement: who you serve, the problem, the help
· Pick one visibility action to run in the next 30 days using effort-versus-impact

Virtual · October 1–3, 2026 · CCE hours · Early Bird $249 through September 1, then $299.

Register: https://addvanceconference.com/event/registration/

One of the most effective and counterintuitive activation tools for professionals with ADHD has roots in established the...
08/08/2026

One of the most effective and counterintuitive activation tools for professionals with ADHD has roots in established therapeutic frameworks and zero cost of entry: deliberate persona adoption.

Character switching — the deliberate act of adopting a persona to access a different internal state — is a practical application of techniques from narrative therapy and schema modes work. For ADHD professionals who've exhausted conventional motivation strategies, it addresses something those strategies don't: the novelty requirement of the ADHD activation system.

The ADHD nervous system responds to novelty. When a task is familiar, low-stakes, or simply not intrinsically interesting, the brain's motivation circuitry doesn't activate reliably. But stepping into a persona — even briefly, even partially — introduces a novelty element that can shift the activation state meaningfully.

For professionals, this has specific applications:

'CEO Me' or 'Executive Function Me' — a persona that is decisive, not negotiating with distraction, and doesn't check the phone before the priorities review is complete. Invoking this character before high-priority professional tasks changes the starting state in a way that motivational self-talk often doesn't.

'Presenter Me' — for professionals who struggle with public speaking anxiety or procrastination around visible professional contributions, a presentation-mode persona can create enough distance from the internal critic to make initiation possible.

The persona doesn't need to be believed in fully or performed perfectly. It functions as a cognitive state shift — a way of stepping into a different relationship to the task than the current state allows.

This technique is professionally legitimate, well-grounded in clinical frameworks, and remarkably effective for ADHD professionals who've found that conventional approaches to professional motivation haven't held.

Do you have a professional persona you step into for specific contexts? I'd love to hear how others have applied versions of this.

Self-compassion is not a soft skill. For professionals with ADHD, it's a performance-critical capacity with a growing ev...
08/07/2026

Self-compassion is not a soft skill. For professionals with ADHD, it's a performance-critical capacity with a growing evidence base — and using self-criticism as a professional motivational strategy is actively counterproductive.

Many high-achieving professionals with ADHD have spent years using their inner critic as a performance engine. Self-criticism feels like it's keeping standards high, preventing complacency, and maintaining the pressure that produces results. For some professionals, it has produced results — but at a significant cost, and with a ceiling.

Kristin Neff's research on self-compassion consistently finds that self-critical motivation strategies are less effective over time, not more: they trigger avoidance and shutdown, constrict cognitive flexibility, and direct substantial processing resources toward shame management rather than problem-solving. The professional who's working twice as hard and still underperforming their capacity is frequently running on shame-fueled motivation — which is expensive to maintain and eventually runs out.

Self-compassion in a professional context doesn't mean lowering standards or accepting poor performance. It means responding to difficulty and failure with the same quality of care and perspective you'd extend to a valued colleague — because that quality of response is neurologically more functional than shame-based response, not just more pleasant.

The three components of self-compassion as a professional practice: naming difficulty accurately without catastrophizing, recognizing that ADHD professional challenges are shared (not evidence of uniquely personal failure), and responding to yourself with genuine encouragement rather than punishment.

For professionals who've been running on self-criticism for years, this shift often unlocks the first sustainable professional motivation they've experienced — because it doesn't depend on maintaining shame as fuel.

What would it change professionally if you stopped requiring shame as a performance motivator? I'd love to explore that question with you.

07/27/2026

They didn't cover this in coach training: how to get found. You understand ADHD deeply, and the right clients still can't see you.

Visibility for a solo coach runs on niche positioning, showing up in the right communities, podcast guesting, and content that compounds over time. "Getting Found Without Ads — Visibility Strategies for ADHD Coaches" is about the part of building a practice that your coach certification doesn't reach.

Virtual · October 1–3, 2026 · CCE hours · Super Early Bird $199 through July 15, then $249.

Register: https://addvanceconference.com/event/registration/

When your brain starts to spiral, an anchor thought is what pulls you back. 🪝An anchor thought is a sentence you return ...
07/25/2026

When your brain starts to spiral, an anchor thought is what pulls you back. 🪝

An anchor thought is a sentence you return to when your inner critic starts running the show.

Not toxic positivity. Not a mantra you don't believe.
A true thing. Something you can actually stand on.

Some I use with clients:

🪝 "My patterns are information, not evidence of failure."
🪝 "Consistency isn't about willpower — it's about support."
🪝 "I am not broken. I live in a world that often doesn't understand how I operate. Today, I choose curiosity over judgment."
🪝 "I'm not a failed neurotypical. I'm a whole neurodivergent person."

Anchor thoughts work best when:
✅ You actually believe them (even a little)
✅ You return to them on ordinary days — not just crisis ones
✅ They speak directly to YOUR specific inner critic

Which of these anchors you most? Save this and write your own at the bottom 🪝 Comment yours below.

06/27/2026

It’s true! I’m excited to speak at the first ADDvanced Conference helping more coaches get found by the people who need them most.

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